“Civilizations have always been pyramidal in structure. As one climbs toward the apex of the social edifice, there is increased leisure and increasing opportunity to pursue hapiness. As one climbs, one finds also fewer and fewer people to enjoy this more and more. Invariably, there is a preponderance of the dispossessed. And remember this, no matter how well off the bottom layers of the pyramid might be on an absolute scale, they are always dispossessed in comparison with the apex.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“The Solarians have given up something mankind has had for a million years; something worth more than atomic power, cities, agriculture, tools, fire, everything; because it's something that made everything possible (...) The tribe, sir. Cooperation between individuals.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“But he no longer feared the fear! It was not something to run from, that fear, but something to fight.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Victories over ingrained patterns of thought are not won in a day or a year.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“What was the first thing a man must do before he can be a man? He must be born. He must leave the womb; and once left, it could not be re-entered.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Mr Baley", said Quemot, "you can't treat human emotions as though they were built about a positronic brain".
"I'm not saying you can. Robotics is a deductive science and sociology an inductive one. But mathematics can be made to apply in either case.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“..."You wash your hands, don't you?"
Bayley's eyes dropped to his hands. They were as clean as need be. "Yes," he said.
"All right. I suppose it's a measure of instability to feel such revulsion at dirty hands as to be unable to clean an oily mechanism by hand even in a emergency. Still, in the ordinary course of living, the revulsion keeps you clean, which is good.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“A robot may do nothing that, to its knowledge, will harm a human being; nor, through inaction, knowingly allow a human being to come to harm.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Baley distrusted overstatement and had no liking for the armchair deducer who discovered certainty rather than probability in the workings of logic.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“It is as much my job to prevent harm to mankind as a whole as yours is to prevent harm to man as an individual.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“You lack the capacity to decipher this particular puzzle.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“If a robot can be manipulated into doing harm to a man, it means only that we must extend the powers of the positronic brain. One might say we ought to make the human better. That is impossible, so we will make the robot more foolproof.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“On Earth, we have a continuous influx of young people who are willing to change because they haven't had time to grow hard set in their ways. I suppose there's some optimum. A life long enough for real accomplishment and short enough to make way for youth at a rate that's not too slow.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Well, not the stuff they use in robotics, which I wouldn’t follow, but sociological relationships I can handle. For instance, I’m familiar with the Teramin Relationship.” “The what, sir?” “Maybe you have a different name for it. The differential of inconveniences suffered with privileges granted: dee eye sub jay taken to the nth——” “What are you talking about?”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Surely the relationship between inconveniences suffered and privileges granted was part of the very essentials of learning how to handle people without an explosion. A private”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Ah, the future good!” Leebig’s eyes glowed with passion and he seemed to grow less conscious of his listener and correspondingly more talkative. “A simple concept, you think. How many human beings are willing to accept a trifling inconvenience for the sake of a large future good? How long does it take to train a child that what tastes good now means a stomach-ache later, and what tastes bad now will correct the stomach-ache later? Yet you want a robot to be able to understand?”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Surely the relationship between inconveniences suffered and privileges granted was part of the very essentials of learning how to handle people without an explosion.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“What phrase was that, sir?” “You said something about interviewing people face to——” He shook his head, his tongue dabbing quickly at his lips. “I would rather not say it. I think you know what I mean. The phrase conjured up the most striking picture of the two of us breathing—breathing one another’s breath.” The Solarian shuddered. “Don’t you find that repulsive?” “I don’t know that I’ve ever thought of it so.” “It seems so filthy a habit. And as you said it and the picture rose in my mind, I realized that after all we were in the same room and even though I was not facing you, puffs of air that had been in your lungs must be reaching me and entering mine. With my sensitive frame of mind——” Baley said, “Molecules all over Solaria’s atmosphere have been in thousands of lungs. Jehoshaphat! They’ve been in the lungs of animals and the gills of fish.” “That”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Baley’s lips twitched. He had guessed that in some ways robotic logic must fall short and he was convinced of it now. As the roboticist had said: Logical but not reasonable.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
“Baley tried to picture a world as a sphere being lit and unlit as it turned. He found it hard to do and felt scornful of the so-superior Spacers who let such an essential thing as time be dictated to them by the vagaries of planetary movements.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from The Naked Sun
Isaac Asimov
Born place: in Petrovichi, Russian Federation
Born date January 2, 1920
See more on GoodReads
“I am always sincere, ma petite, even when I lie." - Jean Claude”
― Laurell K. Hamilton, quote from The Killing Dance
“There wasn't a single item of importance [in the newspaper]. A tower of illusion, all of it, made of illusory bricks and full of holes. If life were made up only of imporant things, it really would be a dangerous house of glass, scarcely to be handled carelessly. But everyday life was exactly like the headlines. And so everybody, knowing the meaninglessness of existence, sets the centre of his compass at his own home.”
― Kōbō Abe, quote from The Woman in the Dunes
“I guess we both understood that our relationship was built entirely on witty repartee, and neither of us thought we could be witty on four hours of shut-eye.”
― Jennifer Echols, quote from Going Too Far
“Jon Spiro had not hired Pex and Chips for their debating sills. In the job interview, they had only been set one task. A hundred applicants were handed a walnut and asked to smash it however they could. Only two succeeded. Pex had shouted at the walnut for a few minutes, then flattened it between his giant palms. Chips had opted for a more controversial method. He placed the walnut on the table, grabbed is interviewer by the ponytail, and used the man's forehead to smash the nut. Both men were hired on the spot. They quickly established themselves as Arno Blunt's most reliable leiutenants for in-house work. They were not allowed outside Chicago, as this could involve map reading, something Pex and Chips were not very good at.”
― Eoin Colfer, quote from The Eternity Code
“Musashi wondered how many people there were who on this night could say: “I was right. I did what I should have done. I have no regrets.” For him, each resounding knell evoked a tremor of remorse. He could conjure up nothing but the things he had done wrong during the last year. Nor was it only the last year—the year before, and the year before that, all the years that had gone by had brought regrets. There had not been a single year devoid of them. Indeed, there had hardly been one day.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, quote from Musashi
Anne of Avonlea
The Queen of the Dam...
I Am Legend and Othe...
The Talisman
Possession
A Court of Thorns an...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.
Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.
